[rules-users] how to specify classpath dependencies in .drl files.

[Godmar Back]

My question is how to manage a rule base that is composed from sets of
rules drawn from different sources.

Our goal is to supply sets of rules as .jar files - each .jar file
containing a related set of rules. For instance, consider an expert
system where different experts could export their expertise in such a
jar file. Such a .jar file would contain one or more .drl files and a
set of supporting .java classes. We'd like to be able to refer to
these .jar files using a URLClassLoader and/or JarURLConnection so
they can be referred to without a user having to download them prior
to starting their application.

Users should be able to combine those provided rules (that is, the
rules of those experts whose knowledge they wish to exploit) with
their own rules in their own .drl files.

My question is whether drools supports such a setup easily.
Specifically, is there a way for a user to import external .jar files
in their .drl files? A statement such as
use jar:http://expertbase.com/expert1/knowledge5.jar
which would instruct the rule compiler to load the classes from this
jar to its compile class path, and which would instruct the class
loader used to load the user's classes to delegate to the loader used
to load the jar file's classes? [Note that a given expert's knowledge
should only be loaded by one classloader.]

I browsed through the API and discovered that the package builder
configuration allows the specification of a class loader. Does this
mean the rule compiler will attempt to load related classes through
this loader as well? If so, it would need to use reflection to examine
those classes (which I'd find unlikely). If not, is there a way to
control the rule compiler's compiler classpath?

In our current prototype, we need to load everything through the
application classpath to avoid compile errors.

 - Godmar